Thursday, May 22, 2014

Some rather spontaneous sketches of Wilbur. In part I'd been meaning to work out how he was able to look with clothes and still go around convincingly.

I also wanted to explore how Wilbur's face could be subtly deformed, though this is actually a challenge as an illustrator; if you're too subtle with the deformations people will think you're just a sloppy artist, while on the other end of the spectrum if you go too far with the deformations you'll have something that wouldn't be able to conceal itself successfully in society, however rural that society might be.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Working on a painting of Henry Anthony Wilcox and this will be the bas relief he's sculpting in the background of the painting. This isn't my rendition of "the horror in the clay", but it's definitely a step in that direction. I painted this on the ipad btw.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

I think that it's fascinating--nay, astonishing--that, though he could write about the plight of alien or alien-like creatures against humans in The Doom that Came to Sarnath as well as In the Walls of Eryx, Lovecraft couldn't see past his own bigotry and Anglophilia to realize that these dramas directly mirrored conflicts of encroachment that the European powers had inflicted upon what he would consider "lesser" races for the past five centuries; the fact he could clearly see the right and wrongs of such actions in his fantastical worlds and be so unbelievably blind to them in his own is one of my favorite examples of complete cognitive dissonance.

This was done on the Ipad3 using the Wacom Creative Intuos Stylus on the art app, Procreate.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Though I enjoyed the overall makeup of the final image, I was always disappointed in the actual creature design for Brad Rigney's rendering of the people of Ib, his version unimaginatively having basically a frog-like head on an otherwise perfectly human body, though this makeup may have more to do with the company who commissioned him rather than his own personal design sense. Here's a couple designs for my upcoming rendering of the people of Ib:

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Before there was Rust Cohle there was Thomas F. Malone, of the Butler Street Station out of New York, who explored the occult machinations around him in The Horror at Red Hook. Its ludicrous racism aside, the story has a unique flavor all its own, and one that was the partial germ of both The Call of Cthulhu and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

I'm in love with Lovecraft's early forgotten story, Polaris, as well as his later, rather brief, additions to the history of Lomar the lost in the far north of the world. I've already rendered the Gnophkehs and Lomarians, so I thought I would turn my attention to the "Esquimaux".

Since Eskimos at no time have been up to battling organized armies, I thought maybe they in the story were simply attributed to being Eskimos, or Esquimaux as Lovecraft colorfully put it, and I thought I could conjure them as something else entirely. I made them tribal, but adorned with bright paint to juxtapose against the muted colors of the Lomarians. I plan to do a serious painting of these antagonists, as well as one of the Lomarians, in the same pose as that of the Gnophkehs painting above.